Caged
by StrangerInAStrangeWorld
Summary: He was hardly the king. Or if he was, than the palace was little more than a gilded cage that trapped him as well as it trapped the monster lurking just beneath the surface.


Most people looked into the mirror and saw themselves. Maybe a bit more tired than their mental image of themselves, a touch more dirt-covered, wetter, perhaps less satisfying, but still themselves.

Hirako Shinji no longer saw himself. He saw a cage.

He was a cage that could walk around like a person, think like one, talk and live some semblance of a life like anyone else could. But the blond was still a cage for the monster that had its talons in every part of him, down to his very soul.

Life among humans had been like a smoker trying to quit being trapped in a store devoted to nicotine and all its deadly riches. Shinji had wanted so badly to tear just one of them from limb, taste the soul and fill the aching almost-void in his own soul. All he had wanted was to make the hunger go away and relieve the loneliness that surged up within him whenever he was away from the other Visoreds. But at the same time the former captain of the Fifth had known that was wrong, so sickeningly wrong and against everything he was. The blond had told the Hollow where it could go stick its impulses and settled for reminding himself that doing so would bring Soul Society down on his head in a heartbeat.

That had always sent a weak thrill of amusement through him, referencing the heart he barely had. Urahara had prevented the destruction of the Visoreds' hearts, but he hadn't been able to stop their inner monsters from consuming much of them. It had become a war between the Shinigami who knew what he should do and who he should be and the Hollow who knew what he wanted to do and who he wanted to be.

Now, back among the Shinigami Shinji resembled so closely, he was walking on eggshells, eternally terrified that one day he would hear a crunch.

Back in the Living World, despite his fierce struggle to suppress the inhuman urges, Shinji had always known that Urahara was a master at covering things up, and there was at least a chance that the resident mad scientist would be able to fool Seireitei into thinking that a regular Hollow had attacked. As the decades had gone on, the likeliness that Soul Society would be looking for them had shrunk into what was in practice nothingness. The blond had privately loathed his transformation, but he still knew that it was closer to a matter of self-pride and decency than anything else that he had put so much effort into resisting.

In Seireitei, things didn't work that way. If Shinji went berserk here, there would be a Zanpakuto through his skull within minutes. It wouldn't matter if he was trying to get control or why he'd lost control in the first place. Shinigami would see a monster and respond accordingly.

So it was up to Shinji to be a cage. It was up to him to keep his food down around the vulnerable and wounded so he wouldn't end up so hungry that he tried to make a meal out of them. He would have to constantly check his inner world for the Hollowfication encroaching further and maintain perpetual calm, lest the Hollow use it as a chance to turn its foothold into complete dominance. Shinji would have to keep his offense strong and defense stronger to make sure no one could make him weak enough to lose the kingship.

The captain of the Fifth had a feeling that Aizen had never intended for the creation of the Visoreds to take him closer to assembling the Espada. He had a feeling that his traitorous lieutenant's subsequent promotion was just a nice side effect.

Aizen's _real _intent, Shinji was sure, was to make sure that his captain would be as isolated as he had been. Becoming Visored had resulted in his loss of authority, dignity, and a home. It had turned all his friends against him for a century and forced the seed of paranoia that had been planted in Shinji's mind when he met Aizen to grow into a full-fledged forest. Nothing was completely safe anymore, not even jazz, with the memories it brought back. A family was out of the question. Just doing the dirty deed could be enough to supercharge his Hollow's power with lust and the exercise of instinct. Might not be, but that wasn't the kind of chances he could take. And if Kurosaki was anything to go by, the kids would be cursed with demons in their little heads too.

Fighting was practically safe by comparison. You could lose yourself in fighting, while being completely in control. Moving through techniques, reacting, calling out commands and calculating every sword swing, those were things Shinji knew as well as the darkness beneath his eyelids. But if someone managed to catch him off-guard, the battlefield would become ground zero for an explosion of the vicious Ceros he knew his Hollow was especially good at producing.

All Shinji had for sure was his inner Hollow. Even Sakanade wasn't a given, the Zanpakuto spirit having disappeared for a good while after his Hollowfication. People could be killed, his captaincy stripped away again, the worlds brought to their knees by the advance of the Quincies, his precious hair shaved off and his record players, both the modern-style one and the original, could be taken away. All that was guaranteed was that his soul would be fucked-up 'til the end of time.

Well, that was okay. It had been a hundred-odd years since the transformation, and he'd continued to go to Urahara every so often and ask if the former captain of the Twelfth had a cure.

"No" was always the answer. "I'm sorry, I'll keep looking, but you know I can't promise anything."

That was all both of them could do, wasn't it? Urahara would keep looking for a cure, a strategy to take down Soul Society's enemies, the foes that gathered already to take advantage of the chaos the Quincies had plunged the worlds into, a new product to market to Shinigami stationed in the Living World who didn't know any better.

And Shinji would keep staring through the cage's bars and hoping for a release.


End file.
